/lit/ - Literature

Popularity has always determined quality. This is the unfortunate truth of the art world. Everything that is popular is good. There is no rebuttal to this.
>But muh Moby Dick muh Vincent Van Gogh!
You are describing something called an aberration. An aberration is a a deviation from the norm.
If I tell you “turning the ignition turns on your car,” and you turn the ignition and your car doesn’t start, that doesn’t prove my statement wrong, it means something happened to your car.
Luckily, such aberrations are corrected with time. Moby Dick was not a commercial bestseller at the time of its release, but due to its quality it became popular with time. Van Gogh is also a high quality artist, so he also became popular. The Thing too has become a Halloween staple. Your retarded belief (that quality and popularity are completely unrelated) can’t account for this or explain it. Why did Moby Dick become popular with time? Shouldn’t it have languished in obscurity forever? No, because it’s high quality. When it wasn’t popular, it became popular, because quality = popularity. If Moby Dick was a bad book, it wouldn’t have become popular over time.

Do popularity and quality have any correlation?

>>20110708

Any art that doesn't seek an audience is dishonest.
It's show business, not show politics.
>Artists are artists they don't owe anyone anything!
And tautologies are tautological.
The value of art is subjective, "selfish" art, made only to please the artist is the extreme of subjectivity pretending to be the rejection of it.
The value of art can only be it's value to others.
Art that does not seek to be valuable to others is therefore built on a lie. It requires a recipient, a second party, and the truth of the art is not what the artist was trying to do, but what was actually achieved in the eyes of the audience.
Naval gazing and self discovery requires no camera, no crew, no cast, no script, no anything but a mind aware of itself. But that's not art.
That the value of art is it's value to others is axiomatic. It can be no other way.

Pop culture is anything but banal. High culture is the farce.